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There isn’t a huge reservoir of polling on veep popularity, largely because the American public is rarely up to speed on what the vice president is doing. Indeed, despite Biden’s nearly four decades in the Senate, his own presidential run and nine months in office, 18 percent of Gallup’s respondents still had no opinion on him. Some pollsters, including Scott Rasmussen, argue that unique events in both the Bush and Clinton administrations make comparisons with Biden nearly impossible.

In Dick Cheney’s case, both he and Bush experienced a major spike in their popularity after Sept. 11, which skews comparisons.

“Historical comparisons are just about impossible to make that this point in time,” Rasmussen said. “The economy is in terrible shape this year. ... The focus needs to be more on policy and less on [ratings] right now. All they indicate is that the public is saying the honeymoon is over.”

In any case, Biden has never paid much attention to polling numbers, according his former campaign consultants and colleagues. And vice presidential aides say his office doesn’t pay much attention even now, choosing to focus on implementing White House economic policy and sending Biden on his unprecedented international peacekeeping tour.

“The vice president is focused very much on all the things he’s doing at the president’s request,” said Biden spokesman Jay Carney. “Overseeing Iraq policy to implementing the Recovery Act to discussing the president’s missile defense plan, so there’s not a lot of time to read polls.”

Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-Del.) who served as Biden’s longtime chief of staff, told POLITICO that Biden rarely focused on polling until the tail end of his senatorial campaigns. Biden’s campaign often ran two sets of polls around Labor Day weekend: a professional benchmark and then brought in swaths of volunteers to run additional surveys.

Delaware’s uniquely small voter population typically allows much of its congressional delegation to maintain steady ratings for years.

“What happens in Delaware is that, once you reach a certain level of approval, people know you so well that your numbers never really change,” Kaufman said. “But Biden was never the kind of person who really monitored what he was doing.”

Even during his presidential campaign, Biden was more focused on getting his message out than tracking numbers, said Celinda Lake, a former campaign polling strategist

Biden didn’t poll often, partially because of budget constraints but also because it wasn’t a top priority.

“Biden isn’t the kind of guy who gets up in the morning and says, ‘What are my numbers today?’” Lake said. “Even as vice president, he’s been more interested in taking big assignments.”

Former Vice President Dan Quayle told POLITICO that he also rarely knew how he was faring in the polls.

“I don’t know what they were. I didn’t look at them,” Quayle said in an interview. Every administration “is going to have its own vice presidential model. We had the Quayle model. It worked very well, but my total focus was two things: One, to be loyal to the president and, two, be prepared if something happened.”

According to former White House chief of staff John H. Sununu, both Quayle and his boss, former President George H.W. Bush, had no interest at all in hearing about poll ratings.

“I served a president who couldn’t care less about what his job ratings were,” Sununu told POLITICO. “If I went into George H.W. Bush’s office and ever mentioned a poll or a job rating, he’d look at me as if I was crazy.”

On Jan. 31, 2007 -- the day Biden announced his presidential bid -- the Delaware Senator was roundly criticized for calling Obama "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man."

In other news, President Obama is set to announce that former Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel (R) will be joining his administration in an intelligence role of some sort. Could this be the first step into SecDef?

I seem to remember at the start of the great depression that FDR went on TV to explain how things were going to get better to the American people. Oh wait, that didn't happen, just in Old Joe's mind.....LOL! What a dumbazz.......

Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests President Hussein like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.

I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate. And he's gonna need help. And the kind of help he's gonna need is, he's gonna need you - not financially to help him - we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right.

Gird your loins. It's like cleaning the Augean stables, man. This is more than just, this is more than – think about it, literally, think about it – this is more than just a capital crisis, this is more than just markets. This is a systemic problem we have with this economy.

I've forgotten more about foreign policy than most of my colleagues know, so I'm not being falsely humble with you. I think I can be value added, but this guy has it. This guy has it. But he's gonna need your help. Because I promise you, you all are gonna be sitting here a year from now going, 'Oh my God, why are they there in the polls? Why is the polling so down? Why is this thing so tough?' We're gonna have to make some incredibly tough decisions in the first two years. So I'm asking you now, I'm asking you now, be prepared to stick with us. Remember the faith you had at this point because you're going to have to reinforce us.

There are gonna be a lot of you who want to go, 'Whoa, wait a minute, yo, whoa, whoa, I don't know about that decision'. Because if you think the decision is sound when they're made, which I believe you will when they're made, they're not likely to be as popular as they are sound. Because if they're popular, they're probably not sound.

Osama bin Laden is alive and well and Pakistan is bristling with nuclear weapons.

You literally can see what these kids are up against, our kids in that region. The place is crawling with al Qaeda. And it's real.

We do not have the military capacity, nor have we ever, quite frankly, in the last 20 years, to dictate outcomes. It's so much more important than that. It's so much more complicated than that. And President Hussein gets it.

I probably shouldn't have said all this because it dawned on me that the press is reading this post.

All kidding aside, these guys have left us in a God-awful place. We have the ability to straighten it out. It's gonna take a little bit of time, so I ask you to stay with us. Stay with us. ~ J. Robinette Biden, Democratic Senator from Delaware and genius Vice-President

What a colossal waste of valuable internet! The Vice President is less popular than he was? Who cares? John Nance Gardner is correct, although I doubt the author of this piece of hard-hitting investigative journalism knows who he is, nor would bother to find out.

Please go out and do some research and contribute something meaningful in terms of news. Journalism is indeed dead, and no wonder.

Two Democratic senators from the Northeast — Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut and Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware — became the first casualties of the Iowa caucuses on Thursday night. After both failed to get a single percentage point, they issued statements saying they would drop out of the race.

If only he was just stupid looking and still mostly harmlessly in the Senate .